Category Archives: Performing arts

Cinderella Lives Happily Ever After in Advertising Ephemera

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East of the sun or west of the moon, Cinderella is probably the best known fairy tale in the world and her story has been co-opted by shrewd businessmen eager to sell products.  Three creative examples of advertising ephemera from the collection which exploit the cinder wench are highlighted here.

Ida Rentoul Outhwaite (1888-1960)  is not a household name in America, but she is one of the Southern hemisphere’s most beloved children’s book illustrators.  Famous for having created distinctly Australian fairies and elves, Outhwaite was not above drawing pictures for advertising brochures. “Cinderella’s Dream and What it Taught Her” (ca 1931; Cotsen 86877) is one of her rarest works.  A Fairy Queen visits Cinderella’s dreary room late one night, saying sweetly,  ‘I am here to cheer you dear, / For you work like a drudge all day: / But listen to me, and you soon will see / How your work will become mere play,” as soon as she purchases all the versatile germ-killing products manufactured locally in Melbourne by J. Kitchen & Sons.  (Several will be essential in cementing her power as princess.) No longer will her ugly, fault-finding sisters complain of shrunken woolens once they are washed in Kitchen’s Merino.   Her glass slippers, filthy from running home from the palace through the streets, can be disinfected like the drains and sinks with Kitchen’s strong Phenyle, a deadly poison sold in  glass bottles marked with molded Xes.  Her dressing table in the palace will have bottles of Kitchen’s Velvet Salts, talc for the bath, and medicated soap to keeping the fair complexion fresh.  The flame of the prince’s love will burn true as long as she discreetly stocks Kitchen’s Velvet Shaving Stick–or so it is promised.What must it have taken for mild-mannered Will Keith Kellogg to break away from his brother Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, of Battle Creek Sanatorium fame, and start his own cereal company in 1906? After improving the recipe for their flavorless corn flakes by sweetening them with malt syrup, Will had to figure out how to distinguish his breakfast cereal from his brother’s.  He  set out to vanquish his competitors through the stream of premiums designed to create customer loyalty.  Between 1910 and 1940, Kellogg Co. produced lines of blotters, paper dolls, radio shows, souvenir postcards, and pamphlets mostly aimed at children.

A 4-volume set of Story Game Books featuring characters famous in children’s literature copyrighted in 1931 are now collectibles.  The “Sunshine Fairy” offered general instructions for play and noted that each one in the volume would have individual directions that would need to be learned. The first story in the first volume was Cinderella’s rise from dirty rags to silken gowns (Cotsen 22579).  The prosaic retelling was accompanied by a board game designed by Bess Devine Jewell, a commercial artist who also illustrated Pansy Eyes: A Maid of Japan (c.1922).  This twelve-square adaptation of the classic game of the goose sets players on a quest to find the maiden whose foot will slide into the glass slipper, which cannot be stretched to fit.  The back cover was covered with information from Kellogg’s Home Economics Department on meal planning for growing children.  Mothers were advised that if their little ones did not like milk,  “Cereals are especially helpful in getting milk into the diet.”  A box top from any of Kellogg’s five nutritious cereals and 10 cents glued to the inside of the letter mailed to the company would send a copy of Cinderella and friends to anywhere in the US except for Wisconsin, Washington, Nevada, and Kansas.Mrs. Cinderella  (Cotsen 21954) has a very complicated origin, compared to the previous two pamphlets.  For its pavilion in the 1939 World’s Fair, General Electric commissioned William Duncan and Edward Mabley, co-principals of the famous puppet troupe Tatterman Marionettes, to write and perform a piece promoting the wonders of electricity. After the exposition, the show was taken on the road and performed hundreds of times across the country.  Programs for the original production have survived, but this colorful pamphlet illustrated by North Carolina artist Corydon Bell seems to have been printed  for distribution in retail outlets: the name of Herr’s Garage in Landisville, Pennsylvania is stamped on the rear cover.

It’s unclear how faithful the story in verse here is to the original script for the puppet show that played at the World’s Fair, but the outlines were probably very similar.  The prince carries his bride over the threshold of their starter palace and leaves her the next morning to explore the premises.  After a morning of dusting and mopping, Cinderella discovers that the goblins in residence whose delight is undoing her work.  With a stiff upper lip and sore back, she tries to bake in the ancient kitchen and do the laundry in a wash tub while they wreak more havoc.   Surely her fairy godmother can help her with the gnome problem… She recommends calling General Electric at G-E 1939.  No sooner had she hung up the receiver when a host of elves in tip-top physical condition and dashing uniforms.  Armed with guns, they shoot at the goblins and force a retreat.The elves have just begun to work.  The inadequate kitchen and laundry room are completely modernized, from the plumbing to the cabinetry.  Within hours they install the entire range of GE labor-saving appliances–refrigerator, dishwasher, garbage disposal, toaster, coffee maker, washing machine, water heater.  The powerful new vacuum cleaner makes the disgraceful living room carpet look like new in sixty minutes.  And they thoughtfully prepared a hearty, heartwarming meal for her charming prince when he comes home.The moral is too obvious to bear repeating, but here it is anyway:

The General Electric Co. is able / To sell you, thru a plan that’s all its own, / ADDED HOURS OF FREEDOM,/ And for happiness you need them,/ Cause there’s nothing so important as your home.

Someone–a woman–who owned of this copy left a tart note inside. complaining about a woman of her acquaintance who swallowed the message whole before learning that “all men are rats.”

The King of Barbary in Dick Whittington and His Cat: From Caliph to Chinese Emperor

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There’s no magic in the rags-to-riches story of  Dick Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London, shown at the left at the height of his fame from a chapbook ca. 1808 published by T. Sabine and son (Cotsen 154124).  The orphan owes his fortune to a cat whose special power is the ability to slaughter enormous numbers of mice and rats in short order.  The scene, which realigns the boy’s stars, is set in a faraway land with there are no felines, but many of us probably don’t remember it is somewhere in the East. The history of its illustration is interesting for a twist that seems to have gone unnoticed.

Here’s a summary of the events leading up to the scene. Dick was a scullion employed by Mr. Fitzwarren, a wealthy merchant.  His life was made miserable by the tyrannical cook and the vermin overunning his attic room. With a penny received for an errand, he purchased a cat, who eradicated them  When Fitzwarren had a ship ready to depart to foreign lands, he always invited every member of the household to invest.  As capital, Dick put in  the cat, being his only piece of property (illustrated to the left from The famous and remarkable history of Sir Richard Whittingon (1656). The master’s ship was driven ashore on a part of the Barbary Coast where no Englishmen had landed.  The resident Moors received the British graciously and the King was so pleased by the goods he was shown that the captain and the factor were invited back to the palace.  A sumptuous feast was laid out, but no one could enjoy a bite because a torrent of rats and mice befouled and devoured everything.  The king vowed it would be worth half his treasury to control the beasts, so the factor had the brilliant idea of bringing Dick’s cat to the palace.   Puss was expecting kittens very soon, but in spite of her condition, she was so efficient that a  king’s ransom was given for her and her litter in order to decimate the country’s population of rats and mice.

How has this scene showing an exchange between two cultures, religions and races been depicted over time?  Given the outline of the story, it lends itself to dramatic treatment rather than cultural commentary and that is how it was presented in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century chapbooks.  The first one comes from The famous and remarkable History of Sir Richard Whittington (1656), the second from The Children in the Wood, to which is added The History of R. Whittington (London: Sabine and Son, ca. 1810) The one on top ignores the text and does not darken the King of Barbary’s skin–it’s his headware and slippers with the pointed toes that mark him as an exotic foreigner.  In the second cut, turbans capped with crowns and skin color distinguish the King and Queen from the European visitor, but all the figures have been cut in such a rudimentary fashion that it would be difficult to see in them reflections of actual attitudes towards the other.

Although smaller than the first two examples, these blocks from an early nineteenth provincial chapbook, Whittington and his Cat (Otley, York: W. Walker, ca. 1820: Cotsen 150398)  are by two hands.  But even the less accomplished of the two represents the European as more noble and civilized than his Black Moorish hosts, whose features look as if they have been gouged into the block.  Neither the king nor queen wear the flowing robes associated with Moors and it’s hard to say if they are supposed to wearing the native dress of a particular country or if they came out of the cutter’s imagination.

The hand-colored engraved frontispiece of The History of Whittington and his Cat (London: Orlando Hodgson, 1833: Cotsen 95990) above  transformed the King of Barbary into the Emperor of Morocco, who seems to be wearing vaguely Chinese finery and forsaken a turban.   What has precipitated this change?   Perhaps that this illustration was influenced by a popular stage production. While the publisher Hodgson, is best known for his satirical political prints, he also issued toy theaters, many of whose scripts were based on the best known contemporary plays, and versions of fairy tales not taken from the originals, but from the versions that held the stage for some time.

December 26th 1815, the pantomime Harlequin Whittington premiered at  Covent Garden Theater, praised by the European Magazine for the beautiful scenery and well-staged stunts, which included a balloon ascent and a final production number punctuated by fireworks.    In the cast was the beloved clown Joey Grimaldi who delivered the showstopping number, “All the World’s in Paris.”    There was no  Emperor of Morocco listed as a character in the early playbills I could access, but it may have been better for business to emphasize the spectacular effects and Grimaldi’s hit song.

But the subsequent history of Whittington on the stage suggests that the scene where the foreign king is astounded by a cat would continue to change. The folk tale quickly became established in the nineteenth century as among the most popular subjects for pantomime productions. While the Emperor of Morocco can be found in the programs’ dramatic personae, it is clear that the character no longer owed much to the traditional chapbook. Late in the Victorian period, the role was assigned to the First Boy,  a charming young actress whose legs could be shown to advantage by the costume designer (this drawing is reproduced from the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum).  And a highly unscientific search for pictures of the Emperor in contemporary productions did not (unsurprisingly) turn up Black actors or white men in black face playing the part.